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This is another belated Christmas recipe (although generally a wintery one so I don't feel too bad. subject of Eggnog came up with one of my sisters, and when I said I had never tried any, she sent me a recipe

I am not vegetarian, gluten-free or vegan (a glance at my other recipes should confirm that for anyone I did use some sausage in this but it can easily be skipped to make the recipe vegetarian or vegan.

As mentioned in Day 54 of The Challenge I planted a bunch of tomatoes this year by putting sliced tomato under a thin layer of earth. I ended up with 19 tomato plants on my little balcony. Because of how late they sprouted, we only had a few ripe tomatoes from them. The rest were growing nicely but didn't get the chance to ripen. With the first frost predicted, we harvested them and my dad's remaining green tomatoes and turned them into chutney to avoid having them go to waste. I had never tried this before but was quite pleased with how it came out! Ingredients: 2.5 - 3 kg of unripe tomatoes 3 cooking apples, cored and chopped 3 onions, chopped 1 1/2 c raisins 1 c red wine vinegar 1 1/2 c white cooking wine 1 1/2 - 2 c brown sugar 2 tsp ground ginger 2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg 2 tsp ground cinnamon 1 tbsp chilli flakes ( I used pul biber, Turkish red chilies) 1) Stew the tomatoes, apples and onions in a little water until they disintegrate. Add raisins, sugar and vinegar, then the spices and cook over a low heat. Place a saucer in the freezer. 2) Stir occasionally to prevent the chutney from sticking. As it thickens you'll need to stir more consistently. Taste test to check for sugar and spicing, and feel free to tweak to your taste! 3) Drop some of the hot chutney on the saucer from the freezer. If after a minute if starts to solidify and the top wrinkles and pulls tight, it should gel nicely once cool. If not, then boil it a bit longer or add sugar (or both). 4) To sterilize jars: boil clean jars and their lids for at least 15 minutes. Fill them with the boiling chutney immediately on removing them from the boiling water (canning tongs make this so much easier and makes it less likely that you'll burn yourself, but you can do it with a spoon or a spatula and a dish cloth). Fill to just below the rim, wipe the grooves clean and screw the lid on tight. As the jars and contents cool, the centre of the lid should be sucked down and the jars will be sealed properly. Place the jars upside down on a clean cloth. Label when cool. (The part about putting them upside down is from my German Oma, I don't know what's behind it but it works.) This chutney was a little on the sweet side, which I hadn't expected. There was a slight bitterness to the after taste when it was hot that I tried to compensate for. It is not overly sweet and still has the sour, spiced chutney notes, no more bitterness. It is very tasty, especially with the baked pancakes! I highly recommend this if you have green tomatoes you don't want to spoil!

For World Environment Day on June 5th I was invited to take part in a collaboration making plant based, sustainable meals, and this is the one I came up with. Everything , or very nearly, was locally sourced from local farmers or foraged by Little One and I. After a visit to a local farmer, where I picked up yellow carrots, I started playing around with ideas of what I could make using those. Then there was local barley from the mountains on sale in the grocery store, so I decided on a tart, grinding the barley for the crust. For the other components of the tart I decided to go pick nettles for a pesto, which eventually ended up being nettle and dandelion, and to make ricotta with milk from the local dairy. I found other edible wild flowers too, so those were incorporated into the plan. I am really glad that I agreed to take part in that collaboration as otherwise I wouldn't have necessarily put all these components together, and it was really fun and came out super tasty! Ingredients: For the crust: 1 c barley flower (I ground up whole barley in the coffee grinder) 1 1/4 c whole meal flour 1/4 - 1/3 c cold butter 1/3 c milk For the pesto: 3-4 c nettles, washed in vinegar and then steamed til just wilted 1-2 c dandelion leaves 2 cloves garlic 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp vinegar juice of 1 lemon a little water Salt and pepper to taste For the tart: 7-8 yellow carrots, quartered or eighthed lengthwise 1 c pesto 1/2 - 1 c ricotta OR Goat cheese 1-2 tsp wild thyme 1 1/2 - 2 tbsp honey 1 tbsp olive oil salt and pepper Wild flowers to top: Clover Wild thyme Wood sorrel 1) Make the crust: Place flour and barley flour in a bowl and cut in the butter in small dice. Rub butter into the flower with fingertips until a crumby mixture forms. Add milk and mix until just combined. Chill 30 minutes. 2) Make the pesto. Place all ingredients in a blender and blitz until smooth. Taste test. Dandelion leaves can be a little bitter, so add some lemon juice to counterbalance this if necessary. 3) Assemble the tart. Roll out the crust to the size of your tart plate, and line the bottom of the dish with it. Spread the pesto over the base and then arrange the carrots over the top radially. Dollop the honey and drizzle the olive oil over the carrots. Mix the wild thyme into the ricotta and then spread the ricotta over the carrots. Salt and pepper to taste. Bake at 190°C for 35-45 minutes, until the crust is golden and the carrots are tender but not soft. 4) Allow to cool a little and arrange the wild flowers over the top (optional). This was beautiful! All the flavours balanced each other beautifully, with the bitter dandelions and sweet carrots and honey and the acidic lemon and the creamy cheese. The tart was hot, the flowers fresh, the pesto deep, the lemon bright. And the colours truly popped! Eating it, it occurred to me that goat cheese could work very nicely on it, so when we heated it up on day 2 I added some and it did indeed work very nicely. Otherwise, more ricotta could be nice but is certainly not essential. I was really interested to see how the crust would come out. I don't often cook with non-wheat flours, and some I have used, like rice flour, I am not a fan of. Grinding my own grain into flour was certainly a first too. It came out very well. A little toothier than regular crust because there's only so fine I can get flour in a coffee grinder, and a little sweeter. It was a bit darker too, and I must say that it came out looking a little rustic (which matched the wild flowers, so that's fine.) The only potential change I would make otherwise would be to begin roasting the carrots ahead of time, or parboil them next time to kick start their cooking process. Otherwise, I am thoroughly delighted with this dish, as were Hubby and Little One.

I believe the original recipe called for raspberry jam, but I used red currents as that is what I had

Skip the parmesan to make this recipe vegan.

Around Thanksgiving, my cousin had mentioned making his mom's Cuban stuffing, so I asked her for the recipe

These were arguably better than the original pasta the sauce was used for.

It was Little Bit's first time trying chocolate cake, and he was a bit disappointed originally that I

I tried to grow all sorts of things on my balcony this year - thyme, rosemary, beets, strawberries, peppers, basil... Between late frost, two hail storms and a lot of rain this year on the one hand and a very enthusiastic, helpful toddler on the other, not much survived. The carrots did though. I had to bail them out at times, but I grew them from seed and was excited to watch them grow taller and taller. Eventually, by early November, the carrot tops were each about 2 cm wide, if not bigger, and the greens were easily 40cm tall. I excitedly kept an eye on them and left them in the ground, figuring them I would harvest them in time for Thanksgiving. When I did harvest them on the Thursday of Thanksgiving, two days before our dinner, I was rather bewildered when the first one left the ground. Had I broken it? No. There were root hairs hanging from the bottom of the carrot. That was all there was. Each of the carrots, 2 cm or more at the top, was only 2 to 3 cm long. I cleaned them up and supplemented them with store-bought carrots for Thanksgiving dinner and laughed off the failure. The tops were big and bushy though. I didn't want to just chuck them in the compost, especially given how meagre the carrot harvest had been. Some went into the stuffing instead of celery - which couldn't be had even for ready money - but that still left me with a big bunch. Needing to clear it off the counter before cooking Thanksgiving dinner, the cleaned greens went in the blender with olive oil, lemon juice and water and became Proto-Pesto. For a while, that is all it was, as we ate through leftovers. This proto-pesto proved very handy though, on savoury French toast, in the Leek and Cheese Tart, and the Pumpkin and Stuffing Casserole, and in little leftover pies. The Proto-Pesto then went in the freezer to await the end of the festive season, with all its traditional meals, time away and masses of food. This week I pulled it back out though and turned it into pesto. It is tasty as a dip for tortilla chips, or spread on little puff pastries with tomato paste and parma ham, with or without cheese, and of course, the classic, with pasta. I still have some left, so we'll see what we use it for! Ingredients: 1 very large bunch of carrot greens (6 ish cups when chopped) Juice of 1 lemon 1/2 c water (or enough for the blender to be able to run) 1/2 c olive oil 1/2 c parmesan 1/4 c ground hazelnuts 1 tbsp sumac 1 tsp dried orange peel Salt to taste 1) Blend all ingredients together until smooth. Taste test and adjust as necessary. Add to pastry or pasta, use as a spread, or simply dip. Enjoy. This one has been a while in the making, given that I started it way back at Thanksgiving, but it was worth it. I enjoyed it every way we've tried it so far. Book Pairing: When I first made the Proto-Pesto, I was listening to the Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell. I enjoyed it, but it is definitely Grit Lit, which I sometimes have to be in the mood for. Finishing this Pesto and making my little Pastry Swirls, I was listening to Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. I didn't really think about it while cooking yesterday (there was rather a lot else going on), but reflecting back now, the difference in tone in these two books is striking. I enjoyed both a great deal, but in very different ways and for very different reasons.